THE KAFIR, THE HOTTENTOT, AND THE FRONTIER FARMER

First edition: 200 pages plus 16 pages of the publisher’s catalogue at the end, chromolithographic frontispiece, folding map – The Bishop of Cape Town’s Visitation 1850 indicated in red, 2 partly hand coloured lithographic plates, 3 engraved plates, recent half brown leather with gilt titling and red title labels on the spine (the leather is slightly rubbed at the top and bottom of the spine and at the corners), brown cloth sides, book plate on the front paste-down endpaper, contents crisp, a very good copy.

Mendelssohn (Sydney) South African Bibliography, volume 2, page 3, ‘The journal extends over the years 1850-1-2, in the course of which the Archdeacon visited the principal towns, villages, and missionary settlements of the Cape Colony, Kaffraria, Natal, and the Orange River Sovereignty, and there is some information respecting the condition of the English and Dutch farmers, at this period, with notes on the Kaffir War. The writer appears to have been hospitably treated by the Boers, and he remarks that he found them “much kinder to strangers than the English people” observing, “I have learnt also to modify my ideas of Dutch harshness towards the coloured people who serve them there is much kindness exercised towards them, in a way that English masters and mistresses seem incapable of. . . . There is less of awful distance kept between the parties.The Dutchman acts peremptorily, but speaks kindly and less haughtily to the natives than an English gentleman is used to do to his inferiors” In referring to the trial of a Kaffir for the murder of a native woman, who, he stated, had bewitched him, the Archdeacon dilates on the folly of missionaries, and other “rulers and governors,” in impressing on the natives that there was “no such thing as witchcraft,” while at the same time they placed in their hands the Kaffir translation of the Bible, with all its references to witches and witchcraft.’